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Are Users ‘Dumb Fucks’ for Trusting Data to Facebook?

A row over Facebook’s casual attitude towards the privacy of its 400 million users is threatening to snowball into a full-blown crisis as high-profile members start closing their accounts.

Facebook seems to deem the situation serious enough to have called an ‘all hands’ meeting of its staff yesterday to address concerns over data protection.

The situation was inflamed when Silicon Alley Insider posted an old instant messaging conversation between Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and a friend in which the then 19-year-old Harvard student called users of his newly founded website ‘dumb fucks’.

During the conversation, Zuckerberg writes: “Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard, just ask. I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS.”

When the friend asks him how he got the information, Zuckerberg replies: “People just submitted it. I don’t know why. They ‘trust me’. Dumb fucks.”

Facebook responded to the publication of the ‘dumb fucks’ message, saying: “The privacy and security of our users’ information is of paramount importance to us. We’re not going to debate claims from anonymous sources or dated allegations that attempt to characterise Mark’s and Facebook’s views towards privacy.”

…Maybe you don't understand the whole point of the internet, Hadrian. Don't you realize that you are supposed to throw all the information you have into an undifferentiated lump in hope that someone, somewhere, will care about it (and, by extension, you) even for a second? For most people of the internet age, there is no finer compliment than to have one's identity stolen!

chuck yeager

short answer ….YES THEY ARE!

http://www.myspace.com/mettaya Mettaya

Personally I like how all of these supposedly hip people, who knew – what – nearly 5 years ago if not more that there was evidence that this 'service' was just an excuse for every dumb shit in the world to pour their data into. Then all of these 'hip' people drag me into the quagmire, but fuck it, I'm more or less done with any notion of hiding, and as for someone wanting access to my finances, better do something about that debt first!

People really must have worse short term memory than I do, and I smoke weed constantly so wtf with that?

Beltonism

The centralization concept that Facebook and others are utilizing is on the way out.

This is why the projects such as diaspora (1) and GNU Social (2) is getting attention. It's all about decentralizing your private content and in that way keep control of it. There's a lot of projects providing new techniques to push and pull content containing your status and updates.

Some people seem to think that the violations of privacy are kind of like the problem of gossip — who knows what embarrassing about you? How royally stupid such a belief is. The real issue, as I see it, is what corporations will DO with that information: Some banks have already been trolling through the internet to assess the creditworthiness of individuals, based on who their friends are, the word-choice of their online postings (Are they educated? Are they smart or dumb?), and whether they seem emotionally stable or not. Soon insurance companies will do the same. If you think I'm making it up, just do a Google search — you can even find it in newspapers like the Washington Post.

All I can say is that if you write something online with your true name attached to it, be sure to think of how it will affect your ability to get a home loan, get reasonable car insurance rates, health insurance, etc. Hell, even if you don't put your name on it, statistical inference methods can figure out who you are, if you give them a large enough corpus of text.

It was once said, “Personal Information is the oil of the 21st century.'' Money, money, money!

daddinobuckz

Unfortanantly, I have been a victim. I signed up for a facebook….and a my space. I realized after my space that once something is put on line, it's there. How else do we get all these great pictures of weirdos and freaks. People post them. I've recently read articles about dumb shit from over 10 years ago. Newspaper articles. There still on there. Lesson to the idiots out there: If you put it online, it's not yours anymore! Lesson learned! No one cares about you and yours like you and yours!

daddinobuckz

…..and just so you know….There is a special branch of the government that gets paid to go thru your shit online to see what is popular and hip. What's being said that shouldn't. Why else did twitter pick up like it did? I mean the guy from venezuala has a staff of people to run his twitter account. Technology kinda sucks!

DaddiNoBuckz

We are dumb fucks for keep making these duchebags millionaires for dumb ideas like facebook!

GoodDoktorBad

My vote is Yes!

tonyviner

If you are stupid enough to put sensitive material on the Internet, not just Facebook, but anywhere people might be able to see it, you deserve what you get. I used to tout Facebook as a great tool for reaching out and connecting with people that you may not have had the opportunity for in the past, but I realized that all you have to do is take the effort and go outside and put down your goddamn cell phone for just one minute to do that.

Rachel

This is something that made me go hhmmmm…?!

anon

I love how everyone seems to think privacy exists on the WORLD WIDE WEB. haha

anon

I love how everyone seems to think privacy exists on the WORLD WIDE WEB. haha

The New York Times decided to write about Facebook's increasingly-labyrinthine privacy policy and noticed that it is actually longer than the U.S. Constitution: In recent months, Facebook has revised its...